Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-18
Blockchain as an ontological fetish
I A machine for believing without believing
In January 2009 Bitcoin's first block carries a Times headline about the bank bailout. A founding act with a citation: the chain is born declaring what it distrusts.
Sixteen years later that chain burns 120 TWh a year to guarantee one thing: that nobody had to trust anybody.
“We pay a mid-sized country's energy so as not to have to look each other in the face.”
II Anatomy of the fetish
Marx called it fetishism to take a social relation between people for a property of the object. Value seems to be in the commodity; in fact it is between the people who make it.
The chain does the same with trust. It seems to be in the protocol — mathematical, inevitable, faceless. But it is still between people: whoever writes the code, whoever runs the nodes, whoever decides the fork.
The difference from the classic fetish is the alibi. The commodity never claimed to be objective. The chain does.
III Table of what is still human
| Presented as | Still is |
|---|---|
| mathematical consensus | an agreement among 4 pools that add up to 62 % |
| immutability | a convention that was broken in 2016 |
| decentralisation | 2 software clients on 95 % of nodes |
| code is law | code somebody versions on a Tuesday |
IV Formula of distrust
- E
- energy spent on guaranteeing
- T
- distrust assumed
- V
- value secured
- D
- institutional density available
The uncomfortable reading: the energy spend does not measure security, it measures the absence of reliable institutions. A society with courts that work secures the same thing with three orders of magnitude less heat.
V Reflective ritualzero chain
-
01
Think of the last important transaction in your life — a rent, a loan between friends.
-
02
Write down who you trusted and why.
-
03
Work out what it would have taken to trust nobody.
-
04
Compare that cost with what trusting cost you.
Nothing is signed, nothing is installed. The exercise is arithmetic and happens on a napkin.
VI Risks of the critique
Saying “it is a fetish” sounds like dismissal, and it is not. Fetishes work: they organise conduct, move capital, hold whole communities up.
And there are places where distrust is rational. Whoever lives under a currency that lost 95 % in five years is fetishising nothing: they are using the tool at hand.
The critique is not aimed at the user. It is aimed at the alibi that the protocol is neutral while somebody, somewhere, decides which version runs.
VII Coda
If a chain's value is the energy nobody will get back, then what is mined is not a coin: it is proof that we would rather burn lithium than repair a courthouse.
And when the last block is written, that is what will be left — a perfect accounting of everything we could not agree by talking.